The H.D. Book

by Coleman, Victor, Duncan, Robert, Boughn, Michael

  But the work was not meant to be convincing. It was meant to be upsetting to the mind that would have tolerated Dr. Wilder as an authority in a curious field of thought but would balk at the pretension of a spirit as an authority in a revelation. Her purpose was not to convert but to overthrow the established orders of thought, to set up whatever was doubted, feared, or despised in the place of the ruling authorities. Yes, but mixed up with the hysterical impulse to insult and subvert the respectable and reasonable was—also a component of hysteria—the intense sense of how much the society itself was in need of some release of vital powers that had been repressed.

  “I am solely occupied,” Blavatsky wrote to her sister, “not with writing Isis, but with Isis herself”:

  I live in a kind of permanent enchantment, a life of visions and sights, with open eyes, and no chance whatever to deceive my senses! I sit and watch the fair good goddess constantly. And as she displays before me the secret meaning of her long-lost secrets, and the veil, becoming with every hour thinner and more transparent, gradually falls off before my eyes, I hold my breath and can hardly trust to my senses! . . . Night and day the images of the past are ever marshaled before my inner eyes. Slowly, and gliding silently like images in an enchanted panorama, centuries after centuries appear before me . . . I certainly refuse point-blank to attribute it to my own knowledge or memory. I tell you seriously I am helped. And he who helps me is my Guru.

  My “Daemon,” Socrates had called him. Or Genius. My Muse, a poet might have called Isis. But Blavatsky was not, she insisted, musing. Whatever else Isis Unveiled might be, it was not to be taken as a scholarly study, a philosophy, or a work of the imagination. It was to be taken as revelation, a dictate of the unconscious. A new specter was raised to haunt the course of Western Civilization.

  “The mind is the great Slayer of the Real,” reads one of the aphorisms in The Voice of Silence, “translated” so Blavatsky declared, out of Senzar, the lost language of the world before Atlantis. The scholar, the philosopher, the poet, were all men of the mind, and in the critical distance of their disciplines or arts, slayers of the real. This “Real” was Isis naked, the Revealed Doctrine. We can read another message in the oracle, for the Mind, the idiotic or autistic dream and will, is also a great slayer of another “Real,” the common sense of things. Blavatsky had set about to destroy what Freud calls the reality principle. John Symonds in his book on Blavatsky, The Lady with the Magic Eyes, comments: “The Mind is here used in the sense of consciousness, upon which all our Western scientific knowledge is based, but which the East regards as only part of the world of illusion.” Blavatsky’s Mind as Slayer of the Real may have stood for the Conscious then at war with the Unconscious, as Freud was to find it in his study of hysteria at the end of the century. Plagiarism, fraud, perversion by pun, by reversal of values and displacement of content, of above into below, of male into female, left into right, before into after—all these Freud saw as operations of the unconscious in the psychopathology of daily life.

  She impersonated the Unconscious, but she also gave her ego over to unconscious—“invisible” or “occult,” she called them—guides. She was unconscious of what she read or learned in talking with Dr. Wilder, and accepted the information only in a trance-like state from the unconscious where it had been banished from her consciousness.

  She was a wishful thinker, and she flew into rages when her wishes were questioned. She did not rage at Nature. Nature seemed to cooperate with her powers. But she was savage when confronted by ways of the mind that others took for granted as proper, by what was right to think, reasonable to hope for. More, she was outraged by her own disciples, the credulous and ever-admiring Olcott, the reason-seeking Sinnett, for she wanted the mind in following her Doctrine to be converted by what it could not believe, to submit to the unreasonable. She did not want her Theosophic manifesto to be accepted; she wanted men to come by way of what they could not accept into the rebellious impulses that lay back of Isis Unveiled. “If you only knew what lions and eagles in every part of the world have turned into asses at my whistle, and have obediently wagged their long ears in time as I piped,” she wrote to a confidante.

  There is pathos in her scorn. She had wanted to awaken a disobedience in man that would restore the lion or eagle he must be. The hidden Adam restored, man transformed under the dictatorship of the unconscious. You have nothing to lose but your chains of belief and disbelief, she had wanted to say.

  For she herself was bound in chains of belief and disbelief. The imagination was intolerable to her conscious mind. She denied that there was any truth or trust in what a man might create or initiate. Even her book, in order to be doctrine, could not be created by her or have any virtue in her own thought but must be dictated by the authority of Masters outside the work, just as the truth of Man could not be immanent in his evolution but must be established in a paradigm, an actual plan given in the beginning, recorded in the eternal—the “Akashic” or Astral Light—and lost. “I certainly refuse point-blank to attribute it to my own knowledge or memory,” she had said then, as if such an attribution would have brought the authenticity of Isis Unveiled into question. She would have excluded the more vehemently any suggestion of her own phantasy or imagination as a source.

  Whatever came from the individual inner volition was suspect. Over and over again she warns against the elemental and animal entities, the false impulses, that threaten any free life of the psyche as a medium. It is experience itself that she warns against. What does not come from a superior external authority, from Adepts “closely connected with a certain island of an inland sea,” what does not come from the teachings of a primal and esoteric wisdom, comes from below, from the Left, from the swarming mass of a false science based upon the senses. All the imaging, voicing, personating, creating activity that characterizes the imagination in the ego was denied and mistrusted by her conscious mind. Only what was actual and imperative was permitted reality. Her ideas, her intuitions, her voices—the imagined teachers Morya and Koot Houmi—were illusions, if they belonged to her own creative life. The Universe itself was Maya, if it was created. The real could not be made up.

  Given the chains of belief and disbelief, the alternative of illusion is delusion. The creative was the veil of Isis. To find the hidden thing one had to strip the creative veil away. The magic of Blavatsky, the fascination of her writing, was never then to be the magic of an enchanting prose, evoking its life in us to become most real in the weaving of a spell that is also a music with many images and levels of meaning—the illusion of an experience. Her magic was to be, on the contrary, the fascination of an argumentative delusion, the pursuit of proofs and laws behind appearances.

  She searched in India and in Egypt, she drew portraits, and, finally, she faked evidence, to prove that her Masters were not figures of a dream or fiction, creatures of the veil, but were actual persons. Anti-materialistic though she declared herself, she could not believe they might be spiritual beings “not of this world.” She rejected all sublimations. Proofs lay in materializations—cups and saucers, gloved hands, bells rung, wafts of scent, actual letters received in a spirit post office. Ideas, imaginings, reveries, were immaterial. She sought only the manifest. Yet she could live too in “a kind of permanent enchantment,” as she writes to her sister, smoking hashish and having, not her own phantasies, but hashish phantasies. Given the manifest agency of the drug, so that any suspicion of her own psychic agency might be denied, she could dwell “with Isis herself.”

  In 1891, a month before her death, she closed her last essay with a quotation from Montaigne: “I have here made only a nosegay of culled flowers, and have brought nothing of my own but the string that ties them.” The string she had brought of her own was the thread of her argument, a wish that she, and mankind with her, might be released from the contradictions of dream and fact, creative idea and actuality, volition and authority that tortured her spirit. But the string was also the quest for the end o
f dream, creative idea, volition—if only they could be proved to be their opposites, so that what we thought was moving would prove to be schematic and settled. The string was the obsessional winding of the thread—the double-faced words “mind” and “real,” the inversion of evolutionary theory, the perversions of geological theory, the inversions that must not be conversions, the transference of fact into fiction and of fiction into the mode of fact, the subversion of accepted scientific thought, the plagiarism, the fraud—worst of all, the reasoning of a woman who knows she must be right and will take any means to prove it.

  With pathos, she added: “Is anyone of my helpers prepared to say that I have not paid the full price of my string?” She had been attacked and exposed, vilified and ridiculed. Her own followers had come to doubt that her Masters “really” existed. But the pathos was Mercurial, for she had meant for her followers in all the stupidity of their conscious minds, bound by chains of Theosophic belief, like her defamers, bound by the chains of scientific or religious disbelief, to pay the full price of her string.

  For the price of the string, the price of the wish, the quest, the obsession, lay in an oppressive state. She had gathered a pitchblende of suggestion, once her doctrine was mixed, in which some radium lay hid. In the mess of astrology, alchemy, numerology, magic orders and disorders, neo-Platonic, Vedic, and Kabbalistic systems combined, confused, and explained, queered evolution and wishful geology, transposed heads—the fact of her charged fascination with it all remains genuine. It has the charge of a need, and her sense binds: that until man lives once more in these awes and consecrations, these obediences to what he does not know but feels, until he takes new thought in what he has discarded from thought, he will not understand what he is.

  Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine, midden heaps that they are of unreasonable sources, are midden heaps where, beyond the dictates of reason, as in the collagist’s art, from what has been disregarded or fallen into disregard, genres are mixed, exchanges are made, mutations begun from scraps and excerpts from different pictures (“2100 quotations . . . without proper credit”) to form the figures of a new composition. In the conglomerate that Blavatsky gathered, things of disparate traditions whirl and take on new shapes for the conscious imagination, separated from their contexts and credits, tainted with foreign meanings. Her conscious insistence that her work was dedicated to the immutable and archetypal Reality of the esoteric wisdom hid or veiled her unconscious wish—it was a vital intuition also of the meaning of science, religion, and art—for a magic to take over nature, our own inner nature then, from the Father, and to give birth to a new Nature, to prove What Is to be an illusion in the light of What Must Be. The Isis, the Esoteric Wisdom of What Is, appears in the imagination to keep alive the rebellious writer’s sympathies with her own nature, with Nature then—in the presence of the would-be usurping wish.

  So, Blavatsky saw vividly how Science, under the dictatorship of Reason, had isolated itself from concern with any world of spirit or psyche, and finally from human and animal sympathies, declaring only that world to exist which could be positively known. “We must bravely face Science and declare,” she wrote in 1888, “that the true Occultist believes in Lords of Light”:

  that he believes in a Sun, which—far from being simply a ‘lamp of day’ moving in accordance with physical laws; and far from being merely one of those Suns, which according to Richter, ‘are sun-flowers of a higher light’—is, like milliards of other Suns, the dwelling or the vehicle of a God, and of a host of Gods.

  Behind the world that science had defined, she sensed intentions and potentialities that disturbed those definitions. There was no realm of matter that was not charged with spirit, and man’s increasing knowledge in the material realm was filled with the karma or hubris of his unacknowledged spiritual content at work there. Blavatsky’s chapter heading in The Secret Doctrine—“Modern Physicists Are Playing At Blind Man’s Buff”—has not lost meaning but has gained in terror in our day. Again and again she portrays eras of desolation and loss in the history of knowing that seem at once to be myths of our present psychic state and ominous predictions of states yet to come. “There had once been,” she tells us:

  on the plan of the Zodiac in the upper Ocean or the Heavens: a certain realm on Earth, an inland sea, consecrated and called the ‘Abyss of Learning’; twelve centers on it, in the shape of twelve small islands, representing Zodiacal Signs—two of which remained for ages the ‘mystery Signs’—were the abodes of twelve Hierophants and Masters of Wisdom. This ‘Sea of Knowledge’ or learning remained for ages there, where now stretches the Shamo or Gobi Desert. It existed until the last great glacial period, when a local cataclysm, which swept the waters South and West and so formed the present great desolate desert, left only a certain oasis, with a lake and one island in the midst of it, as a relic of the Zodiacal Ring on Earth. For ages the Watery Abyss—which, with the nations that preceded the later Babylonians, was the abode of the ‘Great Mother,’ the terrestrial post-type of the ‘Great Mother Chaos’ in Heaven, the parent of Ea (Wisdom), himself the early prototype of Oannes, the Man-Fish of the Babylonians—for ages, then, the ‘Abyss’ or Chaos was the abode of Wisdom and not of Evil. The struggle of Bel and then of Merodach, the Sun-God, with Tiamat, the Sea and its Dragon—a ‘War’ which ended in the defeat of the latter—has a purely cosmic and geological meaning, as well as an historical one. It is a page torn out of the history of the Secret and Sacred Sciences, their evolution, growth and death—for the profane masses. It relates (a) to the systematic and gradual drying up of immense territories by the fierce Sun at a certain prehistoric period, one of the terrible droughts which ended by a gradual transformation of once fertile lands abundantly watered into the sandy deserts which they are now; and (b) to the systematic persecution of the Prophets of the Right path by those of the Left.

  The psychic history of the Universe, Earth, and Man, was the drama of each in the drama of the other, written in traumatic scenes—the freezing of the Hyperborean continent, the submerging of Lemuria and Atlantis, the drying up of the Gobi centers. Just as in the bardic tradition, the poet claims to have lived in all times of history from the creation of the world, so in Blavatsky’s theosophy, the individual psyche of the seer inhabits every place and time, every event in the history of the collective; everything survives in some way or other in man.

  Gwion (Finn) in the thirteenth-century Romance of Taliesin not only tells us that he is the hero or godchild of the land of fairy, Fionn, but names himself also Taliesin, the ninth-century poet, and, again, suggests that he may be a power of the Cosmos, for he claims, “my original country is the region of the summer stars”:

  I was with my Lord in the highest sphere,

  On the fall of Lucifer into the depth of hell.

  I have borne a banner before Alexander . . .

  This “I,” the poet’s persona in his song, lives in whatever he sings, as Madame Blavatsky lives in whatever she knows. What they “imagine” has the autonomy of the given:

  I am a wonder whose origin is not known.

  I have been in Asia with Noah in the Ark . . .

  —just as in the psyche-mysteries of Freudian psychoanalysis, the individual psyche was taken to recapitulate the psychic life of his species; the deepest psychic resources, to be found in the collective unconscious. “Since the time when we recognized the error of supposing that ordinary forgetting signified destruction or annihilation of the memory-trace,” Freud tells us in Civilization and Its Discontents, “we have been inclined to the opposite view that nothing once formed in the mind could ever perish, that everything survives in some way or other, and is capable under certain conditions of being brought to light again, as, for instance, when regression extends back far enough.” Tracing the history of “the Eternal City” Rome, Freud then turns to picture the psyche itself as such an Eternal City in one of those creative phantasies in which Freud works a kind of poetry:

  Now let us make t
he fantastic supposition that Rome were not a human dwelling-place, but a mental entity with just as long and varied a past history: that is, in which nothing once constructed had perished, and all the earlier stages of development had survived alongside the latest. This would mean that in Rome the palaces of the Caesars were still standing on the Palatine and the Septizonium of Septimus Severus was still towering to its old height; that the beautiful statues were still standing in the colonnade of the Castle of St. Angelo, as they were up to its siege by the Goths, and so on. But more still: where the Palazzo Caffarelli stands there would also be, without this being removed, the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, not merely in its latest form, moreover, as the Romans of the Caesars saw it, but also in its earliest shape, when it still wore an Etruscan design and was adorned with terra-cotta antefixes. Where the Coliseum stands now we could at the same time admire Nero’s Golden House; on the Piazza of the Pantheon we should find not only the Pantheon of to-day as bequeathed to us by Hadrian, but on the same site Agrippa’s original edifice; indeed, the same ground would support the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva and the old temple over which it was built.